Emulate

Organs On Chips

Andrew Kuzemczak
June 25, 2025

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TL;DR

Emulate’s Organ-Chip technology mimics real human organ function using microfluidic devices lined with living cells, offering a more accurate, human-relevant alternative to animal models, helping researchers detect toxicities earlier and improve drug safety.
By catching major toxicities like liver, kidney, and GI damage before clinical trials, Emulate can reduce the 90% failure rate in drug development, meaning fewer harmful drugs, safer patients, and faster delivery of effective treatments.
With tools like the Liver-Chip demonstrating up to $3B in potential annual savings—and potentially $24B across multiple organ systems—Emulate could dramatically cut the cost and time of drug development, reversing decades of inefficiency known as “Eroom’s Law.”

Hi friend,

Welcome back to Future Human! It is officially the second week of the last summer vacation of my life! Yeah, try that on for size. Not a day goes by without a physician here at Cornell reminding me that this is my last summer ever. Admittedly, it does not feel much like summer, with the exception of the blistering heat (my shoe actually sunk into the softening asphalt today at E 69th and York Ave). I took a few days off last week to see family, but now things are back in motion. I just got back from a great leadership conference in Washington D.C. and quickly shifted gears to kick off my summer programs Monday morning. It has been a chaotic few days (hence this being a day late).

In D.C., I got to meet a ton of other rising M2’s interested in leading in medicine, which was fantastic. Welcome to those of you who subscribed! I also learned (for the med students in the audience) that the AAMC is a human organization that does more than write the MCAT and manage our applications. Nice people, I swear!

Back to NYC. This summer, alongside research with a cardiothoracic surgeon and separately in a cardiac imaging lab, I will be in the Healthcare Leadership & Management program. TL;DR—we meet close to 40 top level executives across Weill Cornell to learn about the business side of medicine. As someone who loves numbers, I have been enthralled throughout the first three days. Will report back as I learn more!

Let’s return to science for a moment. Last week, when running through the startup list with Nick and Isabelle, I realized we were going on three weeks straight of diagnostic and interventional devices. Although I love that space, I wanted to diversify, so I was excited to hear that Nick was pulling information on a team obsessed with improving the clinical trial process. Why test on animals or humans, when you have tech?

So with that, let me ask you:

What if we could replace animal testing—and predict human drug responses more accurately—using a chip the size of a credit card?

The Story

The origin story of Emulate reads like classic med-tech magic—equal parts curiosity, research hustle, and a big bet on biology. Back in 2007, Dr. Don Ingber, a physician-scientist and founding director of the Wyss Institute at Harvard, saw a grad student demo of a “lung-on-a-chip”—basically, a plastic device with micro-scale airways, but no actual living tissue. He was intrigued. So when postdoc Dan Huh joined his lab shortly after, Dr. Ingber challenged the two of them to make it real.¹

They did. After a few years of trial and error, the team built a fully functioning, living lung-chip that mimicked how real lung tissue works, right down to breathing motions. The results were published in Science in 2010, and the work immediately got attention from the research and regulatory worlds.

Things moved fast from there. With funding from DARPA, the FDA, and the NIH, the Wyss team started building a whole suite of “Organ-Chips”—from intestine to kidney to bone marrow. They even connected them together into a kind of “body-on-a-chip” system that could simulate how a drug travels and affects different organs in sequence.

In 2014, they spun the science out of the lab and launched Emulate to bring Organ-Chips to market. Since then, Emulate has been on a tear. Their liver-chip showed in major studies that it could predict drug-induced liver injury better than animal models. Their tech is now used by the FDA, 17 of the top 25 pharma companies, and—no joke—even on the International Space Station. All told, they’ve raised over $200 million and are quietly becoming one of the most important players in drug development today. I have said it before and I will say it again, in a high risk industry like healthcare (read: pharma and biotech), it pays to be the pickaxe and shovel manufacturer for the gold miners.

From a chip in a Harvard lab to a platform that could actually change how we develop safe, effective treatments for patients. Not bad for a piece of plastic.

The Tech

Ever wonder why so many promising drugs fail in clinical trials? A big part of the problem is that the systems we use to test drugs in the lab—from animal models to petri dishes—just don’t replicate real human biology very well. That’s the gap Emulate is trying to fix with a bold idea: Organ-Chips.

Organ-Chips are microfluidic devices lined with living human cells and engineered to mimic the structure, function, and even the physical forces of specific organs—like the rhythmic stretch of breathing lungs or the wave-like motion of the gut. They’re basically mini-organs, built to model human health and disease more accurately than anything before.

Depending on how hands-on a researcher wants to be, Emulate offers several options:¹^,²

BioKits come with everything needed—cells, chips, and protocols—for plug-and-play models of organs like the liver or kidney.
Guided Models let researchers use their own cells, with support from Emulate scientists to model more specialized tissues like brain, lung, or bone marrow.
Community Models are totally DIY—labs create custom models using Emulate’s system. Over 30 models have already been published this way.

Emulate also makes several chip types tailored to different research needs:

Chip-S1 simulates mechanical strain for dynamic environments like intestines or airways.
Chip-R1 is made of inert plastic, ideal for pharmacokinetics and toxicity work.
Chip-A1 supports thick tissue models like skin and tumors.

Then there’s the tech that brings these chips to life. Meet Zoë: Emulate’s benchtop system that keeps up to 12 Organ-Chips alive and thriving. It automates flow, oxygenation, and even stretch, so researchers can recreate precise microenvironments without a jungle of tubes and syringes. You control everything: media flow, timing, and pressure down to the microliter and millisecond.

And for those who want scale: AVA is Emulate’s high-throughput workhorse. It can run 96 chips at once, allowing teams to generate copious human-relevant data quickly—especially useful in drug screening or safety testing.

Oh, and Emulate isn’t just hype. In a 2022 study, their Liver-Chip outperformed both animal models and spheroids in predicting drug-induced liver injury. That’s the kind of result that could save time, money, and lives.³

Bottom line: Organ-Chips aren’t science fiction—they’re here now, and they just might reshape how we do translational science.

The Market

The organ-on-a-chip (OOC) market is booming. It was valued at only $157 million in 2024 but is expected to hit nearly $952 million by 2030, growing at an absurd 35% annual rate. This rapid growth is largely due to the rising demand for better alternatives to animal testing in drug development and toxicity studies, which often fail to predict human outcomes accurately.

North America dominates the market with over half the revenue share (52%) in 2024, while Asia Pacific is the fastest-growing region, expected to grow nearly 30% annually in the coming years as research investments ramp up. Drug discovery is the biggest application, accounting for nearly 63% of the market revenue, and pharmaceutical and biotech companies make up the largest user base at 73%.⁴

Emulate is one of the pioneers in this space, known for its sophistication when combining living human cells with precise mechanical and chemical environments. Their platform supports a wide range of organs — from liver to lung to brain — and has been widely adopted by many up to the FDA itself.

But Emulate isn’t the only player:⁴^,⁵^,⁶

CN Bio Innovations focuses on scaling their organ-on-a-chip solutions, particularly liver models that help predict drug toxicity more efficiently
- In April 2024, they raised $21 million to expand product development, capitalizing on new legislation like the US FDA Modernization Act 2.0, which encourages alternatives to animal testing
MIMETAS developed their own microfluidic organ-on-a-chip models and recently joined a large Dutch government-backed initiative investing over $130 million to accelerate animal-free biomedical research.
AxoSim (now 28bio) specializes in neurological models, particularly 3D brain organoids derived from human stem cells
- Their Nexon™ platform recreates complex brain tissue to improve drug development for neurological diseases

Another notable player is The Charles Stark Draper Laboratory, a nonprofit that has developed a high-throughput organ-on-chip platform with built-in sensors and automated flow controls, working with big pharma like Bristol-Myers Squibb to develop liver tissue models for drug toxicity screening.

The market’s rapid growth is also fueled by regulatory support. Since 2010, the NIH and FDA have promoted microphysiological systems (MPS) like organ chips to improve drug safety testing with more human-relevant models. This push has helped legitimize OOC technologies and driven increased funding and adoption.⁷

The Sick

When we think about what Emulate could mean for the “sick,” it’s important to understand this technology isn’t focused on one specific disease. Instead, Emulate’s Organ-Chip platform can test drugs across multiple organs and disease areas. Its real promise lies in reducing drug toxicity — a major cause of patient harm and drug development failures.

Toxicity is a huge challenge in drug trials. About 30% of drugs fail human clinical trials due to unexpected toxic side effects, while another 60% fail because they aren’t effective enough. These failures not only delay new treatments but also put patients at risk during trials or after a drug hits the market. Liver toxicity (hepatotoxicity) and heart toxicity (cardiotoxicity) are leading reasons drugs get withdrawn post-approval.⁷

Drug-Induced Liver Injury (DILI) is one of the most common and serious toxicities. The liver metabolizes many drugs, but some can cause damage leading to acute liver failure or chronic disease if not caught early. Take TAK-875, a drug for hyperglycemia halted in late-stage trials due to liver toxicity. Retrospective testing on Emulate’s Liver-Chip revealed mitochondrial damage and immune responses that mirror human toxicity. Hindsight is 20/20, but regardless it is pretty brilliant to use your product and say “We (could have) told you so.”⁸

Kidney toxicity (nephrotoxicity) is another major issue. The kidney’s complex filtering system is highly sensitive to drug damage, which can cause acute kidney failure and clinical trial failures. Gastrointestinal toxicity is a third common type, this time most seen in cancer patients receiving chemotherapy, causing mucositis, diarrhea, and constipation in up to 60-100% of cases. Emulate’s Kidney-Chip and Intestine-Chip help predict and mitigate these toxicities early in drug development.¹⁰^,¹¹

Overall, Emulate provides a powerful way to study complex toxicities across organs. By identifying harmful effects sooner, this technology could reduce late-stage drug failures, speed up safer treatments to patients, and lessen adverse drug reactions — making a real difference across many diseases and conditions.

The Economy

If you are a seasoned Future Human reader, you know drug discovery and development is famously long, risky, and expensive. On average, it takes over 10 to 15 years and costs between $1 to $2 billion to bring a new drug to market. Even after getting through the early stages, around 90% of drug candidates still fail during clinical trials (see above: does not work well or causes toxicity).¹²

This is where Emulate’s Organ-Chip technology comes in. Emulate’s Liver-Chip has been shown to detect liver toxicity with an 87% sensitivity and perfect specificity across known drugs. This improved accuracy means pharmaceutical companies could save more than $3 billion a year by avoiding drug candidates that would otherwise fail due to liver toxicity.

If similar models are developed for other common toxicities—like heart and lung—this could save the industry up to $24 billion annually by improving drug development success rates and reducing wasted resources.⁹

The economic impact isn’t just about saving money. It also means getting safer drugs to patients faster. Emulate’s partnership with AstraZeneca, where Emulate scientists are embedded within AstraZeneca’s drug safety labs, shows how the tech is being integrated directly into pharmaceutical workflows to speed up drug testing and improve decision-making.¹³^,¹⁴

To put the bigger picture into perspective: clinical trials alone make up over 75% of drug development costs, with up to 70% of those costs spent on outdated, labor-intensive practices like in-person monitoring. Despite advances in technology, drug development costs have actually doubled every nine years—a trend known as Eroom’s law—meaning it’s getting more expensive and slower to bring new treatments to market.¹⁵^,¹⁶

We at Future Human are fairly confident that of all the disruptors we have assessed, Emulate stands perhaps the best chance to break this pattern. They offer a direct path to more human-relevant data earlier in the process, reducing costly late-stage failures, and cutting down on wasted time and money.

My Thoughts

So there we have it, another pickaxe/shovel concept that gets my heart racing. I hope, for the scientists, engineers, and founders reading, this shows once more that you do not need to bring the next medicine to market to change lives. You can just make the path easier and play a role in countless therapies getting to patients sooner that need them most. Efficiencies added in the pipeline, whether in drug development, device manufacturing, or even direct patient care, are just as valuable as the end products themselves.

I hope to tackle more Wyss Institute startups soon, as this Harvard powerhouse continues to impress with the teams it spins off (a small complement from a rival bulldog). Until next week, stay cool out there everyone!

To more lives saved,

Andrew

I always appreciate feedback, questions, and conversation. Feel free to reach out on LinkedIn @andrewkuzemczak.